1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to data processing systems which are suitable for icon-based operations, and in particular to data processing systems which allow direct icon manipulation operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
In modern data processing operations, it is conventional to have one or more icons displayed on a video display, each of which represent a collection of underlying data. Typically, the data is arranged in a plurality of data fields. For example, an icon can be used to represent a particular entry in an address book. The plurality of fields of data which correspond to the particular representative icon may include name, home phone number, home address, business phone number, business address, E-mail address, facsimile numbers, work department names and numbers, local area network address, and other pertinent identifying information. Address listings in particular have become fairly complicated in view of the numerous modes of communication available with the proliferation of cellular phones, personal fax machines, and home computing devices. It is highly likely that a typical entry in an electronic address book may contain dozens of fields of data which provide useful information regarding the various modes of communicating with family members, friends, business associates, and vendors.
However, modern data processing techniques heavily rely upon the direct manipulation of icons to perform certain operations. For example, graphical pointing devices have been widely recognized as useful tools for manipulating software objects and performing operations upon the software objects. One huge benefit of utilizing graphical pointing devices is that little or no instruction is required since most operators have an intuitive feel for operations which involve graphical pointing devices. One of the most useful operations is the drag-and-drop operation, wherein a graphical pointing device is utilized to select software objects and move them to particular workspaces, storage bins, and iconically-represented functions. For example, a graphical pointing device may be used to select an iconic representation of a software object, such as an address book entry, and to drag that iconic representation of the phone book entry to an iconic representation of a telephone, which initiates a telephone call to the person identified in the software object corresponding to the address book entry. However, due to the fact that most individuals have numerous telephone numbers, it is difficult to initiate the telephone call using a drag-and-drop operation.
Other types of direct icon manipulation operations are significantly impeded, not by the proliferation of data fields in a software object, but by the ambiguity inherent in a combination of a software object and a particular direct icon manipulation operation. For example, using a drag-and-drop operation to drag an address book entry icon to a spread sheet cell or to a document is an inherently ambiguous operation, since it is not clear which particular data fields are of utility. In this particular instance, it is unclear whether the person's name should be dropped, whether the person's E-mail identification should be dropped, or whether the person's entire record should be dropped.
Consequently, in many circumstances the beneficial aspects of utilizing direct icon manipulation operations to perform operations is lost. The operator must resort to reading information from one window or workspace and keying that information into another window or workspace. The speed with which direct icon manipulation operations can be performed is thus no longer realized. Furthermore, the errors inherent in rekeying information between workspaces arises, a disadvantage which is not a great problem in direct icon manipulation operations.
Finally, the synergistic effects of defining operations in terms which correspond to operator intuition is lost and is instead replaced with clumsy and hard-to-learn menus, and keying instructions. Thus, it appears that the proliferation of data fields commonly used by operators, and the significant number of ambiguous direct icon manipulation operations, may combine to stifle the growing effectiveness and industry reliance upon the iconographic representation of software objects and corresponding reliance upon direct icon manipulation operations to facilitate data processing.